First, we will have to ask ourselves, "what is time?" and how does
one travel through time at a rate of speed slower or faster than the
ticking of a clock.

This is not a question that we are going to
answer any time soon as some of the greatest minds in philosophy,
physics, and psychology have grappled with it. We experience time as
one of the fundamental things in our lives, but it is so basic to
our experience that it is difficult to define it in physical terms.

One definition of time is the continuum of experience in which
events pass from the future through the present to the past. But
that does not tell us much. How about, the time as given by a clock;
"do you know what time it is?"; "the time is 10 o'clock."

That still
doesn't tell us what the clock is measuring. Let's get more
sophisticated. Time is the fourth coordinate that is required (along
with three spatial dimensions) to specify a physical event. Now we
are getting more specific, more mathematical, but it still doesn't
tell us what time is.

I will attempt to give an operating definition here, one that is
useful in understanding time travel.

Time is a measurement of
motion. To measure time we need periodic and repetitious motion. The
earth orbiting the sun is one periodic motion that repeats itself
that we use to measure time. The rotation of the earth on its axis
is another motion we use to measure time.

Sometimes these motions
depart from exact repetition even if just by a second. We can call
any instrument used to measure time a clock. We are always searching
for clocks of greater precision which means that during each cycle
of the clock there is little deviation from period to period.

We have a periodic motion of the earth with its diurnal rotation on
its axis. At the same time the earth advances in an elliptical orbit
around the sun which makes a difference in time between a solar and
a sidereal day. The whole solar system is then proceeding on a
journey around the galaxy in what may be a sinusoidal orbit which
has a period in a range of 220 to 250 million years.

It would be
useful to pinpoint our position in this galactic cycle as well as
determine our path of travel and rate of travel in order to map out
a timeline of critical events in the historical record against this
great galactic year herein referred to as a Cosmic Year.

If we can
consider this Cosmic Year to be a grand cycle, and other periodic
motions as minor cycles and certain intersection points as major
cycles, we may be able to predict future events using a cyclic time
map.

The
Grand Cycle
The sun is one of hundreds of billion of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

The galaxy is composed of gaseous interstellar medium,
neutral or ionized, sometimes concentrated into dense gas clouds
made up of atoms molecules, and dust.

All of the matter - gas,
dust, and stars - rotate around a central axis perpendicular to the
galactic plane. The centrifugal force caused by the rotation
balances out the gravitational force, which draw all the matter
toward the center.

The mass is located within the circle of the Sun's orbit through the
galaxy is about 100 billion times the mass of the Sun.

Because the Sun is about average in mass, astronomers have concluded that
the
galaxy contains about 100 billion stars within its disk.

All stars in the galaxy rotate around a galactic center but not with
the same period

Stars at the center have a shorter period than
those farther out

The Sun is located in the outer part of the
galaxy

The speed of the solar system due to the galactic rotation
is about 220 km/s

The disk of stars in the Milky Way is about
100,000 light years across

The sun is located about 30,000 light
years from the galactic center

Based on a distance of 30,000 light
years and a speed of 220 km/s, the Sun's orbit around the center of
the Milky Way once every 225 million years. The period of time is
called a cosmic year. The Sun has orbited the galaxy, more than 20
times during its 5 billion year lifetime.

The motions of the period
are studied by measuring the positions of lines in the galaxy
spectra.

The orbit of the Sun around the
Milky Way is influenced by the
galaxy's matter, which does not solely occupy the galactic center.

Instead, it is distributed all over space. Some of the galaxy's mass
is inside the sun's orbit and some of it is outside. The Sun's
orbital period is determined by the galaxy's mass within the orbit
of the Sun.

Newton's explanation of the speed of stars in the Milky Way is as
follows. He showed that stars closer to the galactic center,
including the Sun, experience a gravitational pull equal to the pull
created by the mass that is equal to that of all the stars closer to
the galactic center. Hence, the mass of the galactic center is equal
to the total mass of all the stars closer to the center.

He also showed that stars farther from the center have a combined
gravitational force of zero.

Those stars pull in all different and
opposite directions, canceling out one another. Therefore, the stars
closer to the center experience a gravitational pull towards the
center and they move at greater speeds, since there is more force
acting upon them.

Conversely, more distant stars have less force
acting upon them and in turn, they travel at lower speeds. In
addition, stars beyond this distance have speeds that stop
decreasing and eventually remain constant.

We will examine some of these figures given above again by making
certain calculations based on the researches of Bob Alexander and
others on periodic catastrophic events such as the great extinction
events that have occurred in earth's long history going back to 250
million years ago.

Astronomers focusing on a
star at the center of the Milky Way say they have measured
precisely for the first time how long it takes the sun to circle
its home galaxy: 226 million years. The last time the sun was at
this exact spot of its galactic orbit, dinosaurs ruled the
world.

Using a radio telescope system that measures celestial distances
500 times more accurately than the Hubble Space Telescope,
astronomers plotted the motion of the Milky Way and found that
the sun and its family of planets were orbiting the galaxy at
about 135 miles per second.

That means it takes the solar system about 226 million years to
orbit the Milky Way and puts the most precise value ever
determined on one of the fundamental motions of the Earth and
its sun, said James Moran of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

A report on the finding was presented Tuesday at a national
meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

"Our new figure of 226 million miles is accurate to within 6
percent," Mark Reid, a Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer and leader
of the team that made the measurements, said in a statement.

The sun is one of about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way,
one
of billions of ordinary galaxies in the universe.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with curving arms of stars pinwheeling out from a center.

The solar system is about halfway out on one of these arms and
is about 26,000 light years from the center. A light year is
about 6 trillion miles.

Reid and his team made the measurement using the
Very Long
Baseline Array, a system of 10 large radio-telescope antennae
placed 5,000 miles across the United States, from the U.S.
Virgin Islands to Hawaii.

Working together as a single unit, the antennae can measure
motions in the distant universe with unprecedented accuracy.

The accuracy is such that the VLBA can look at a bit of sky that
has an apparent size one ten- thousandth the diameter of a human
hair held at arms length.

For their solar system measurement, the astronomers focused on
Sagittarius A, a star discovered two decades ago to mark the
Milky Way's center. Over a 10-day period, they measured the
apparent shift in position of the star against the background of
stars far beyond.

The apparent motion of Sagittarius A is very, very small, just
one-600,000th of what could be detected with the human eye, the
astronomers said.

Reid said the measurement adds supports to the idea that
the
Milky Way's center contains a supermassive black hole.

"This ... strengthens the idea that this object, much smaller
than our own solar system, contains a black hole about 2.6
million times more massive than the sun," Reid said in a
statement.

Moran said the new measurement of the solar system orbit adds
new accuracy to a fundamental fact of the universe: Everything
is moving constantly.

The Earth rotates on its axis at about
1,100 miles an hour, a
motion that creates day and night.

The Earth orbits the sun at about
67,000 miles an hour, a motion
that takes one year.

The sun circles the Milky Way at a speed of about
486,000 miles
per hour.

And every object in the universe is moving apart from
the other objects as the universe expands at a constantly
accelerating rate.
This press release gives us some more accurate figures to work
with.

Mass
Extinctions Occur Every 62 Million Years
Let us now look at another press release from March 10, 2005:

With surprising and mysterious
regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles
of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley
scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking
computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500
million years.

Their findings are certain to generate a renewed burst of
speculation among scientists who study the history and evolution
of life.

Each period of abundant life and each mass extinction
has itself covered at least a few million years - and the trend
of biodiversity has been rising steadily ever since the last
mass extinction, when dinosaurs and millions of other life forms
went extinct about 65 million years ago.

The Berkeley researchers are physicists, not biologists or
geologists or paleontologists, but they have analyzed the most
exhaustive compendium of fossil records that exists - data that
cover the first and last known appearances of no fewer than
36,380 separate marine genera, including millions of species
that once thrived in the world's seas, later virtually
disappeared, and in many cases returned.

Richard Muller and his graduate student, Robert Rohde, are
publishing a report on their exhaustive study in the journal
Nature today, and in interviews this week, the two men said they
have been working on the surprising evidence for about four
years.

"We've tried everything we can think of to find an explanation
for these weird cycles of biodiversity and extinction,"
Muller
said, "and so far, we've failed."

But the cycles are so clear that the evidence "simply jumps out
of the data," said James Kirchner, a professor of earth and
planetary sciences on the Berkeley campus who was not involved
in the research but who has written a commentary on the report
that is also appearing in Nature today.

"Their discovery is exciting, it's unexpected and it's
unexplained," Kirchner said. And it is certain, he added, to
send other scientists in many disciplines seeking explanations
for the strange cycles. "Everyone and his brother will be
proposing an explanation - and eventually, at least one or two
will turn out to be right while all the others will be wrong."

Muller and Rohde conceded that they have puzzled through every
conceivable phenomenon in nature in search of an explanation:

"We've had to think about solar system dynamics, about the
causes of comet showers, about how the galaxy works, and how
volcanoes work, but nothing explains what we've discovered,"
Muller said.

The evidence of strange extinction cycles that first drew
Rohde's attention emerged from an elaborate computer database he
developed from the largest compendium of fossil data ever
created. It was a 560-page list of marine organisms developed 14
years ago by the late J. John Sepkoski Jr., a famed paleobiologist at the University of Chicago who died at the age
of 50 nearly five years ago.

Sepkoski himself had suggested that marine life appeared to have
its ups and downs in cycles every 26 million years, but to Rohde
and Muller, the longer cycle is strikingly more evident,
although they have also seen the suggestion of even longer
cycles that seem to recur every 140 million years.

Sepkoski's fossil record of marine life extends back for 540
million years to the time of the great "Cambrian Explosion,"
when almost all the ancestral forms of multicellular life
emerged, and Muller and Rohde built on it for their computer
version.

Muller has long been known as an unconventional and imaginative
physicist on the Berkeley campus and at the Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory.

It was he, for example, who suggested more than 20
years ago that an undiscovered faraway dwarf star - which he
named "Nemesis" - was orbiting the sun and might have steered a
huge asteroid into the collision with Earth that drove the
dinosaurs to extinction.

"I've given up on Nemesis,"
Muller said this week, "but then I
thought there might be two stars somewhere out there, but I've
given them both up now."

He and Rohde have considered many other possible causes for the
62- million-year cycles, they said.

Perhaps, they suggested, there's an unknown "Planet X" somewhere
far out beyond the solar system that's disturbing the comets in
the distant region called the Oort Cloud - where they exist by
the millions - to the point that they shower the Earth and
cause extinctions in regular cycles.

Daniel Whitmire and
John Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette proposed that
idea as a cause of major comet showers in 1985, but no one
except UFO believers has ever discovered a sign of it.

Or perhaps there's some kind of "natural timetable" deep inside
the Earth that triggers cycles of massive volcanism, Rohde has
thought. There's even a bit of evidence: A huge slab of volcanic
basalt known as the Deccan Traps in India has been dated to 65
million years ago - just when the dinosaurs died, he noted.

And
the similar basaltic Siberian Traps were formed by volcanism
about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period,
when the greatest of all mass extinctions drove more than 70
percent of all the world's marine life to death, Rohde said.

The two scientists proposed more far-out
ideas in their report in Nature, but only to indicate the
possibilities they considered.

Muller's favorite explanation, he said informally, is that the solar
system passes through an exceptionally massive arm of our own spiral
Milky Way galaxy every 62 million years, and that that increase in
galactic gravity might set off a hugely destructive comet shower
that would drive cycles of mass extinction on Earth.

Rohde, however, prefers periodic surges of volcanism on Earth as the
least implausible explanation for the cycles, he said - although
it's only a tentative one, he conceded.

Said Muller: "We're getting frustrated and we need help. All I can
say is that we're confident the cycles exist, and I cannot come up
with any possible explanation that won't turn out to be fascinating.

There's something going on in the fossil record, and we just don't
know what it is." 1

Periodic
Mass Extinctions, Alexander's Thesis
Let us now look at Bob Alexander's thesis and calculations which I
will vary somewhat to determine the actual length of the Cosmic Year
if his sinusoidal orbit is taken into consideration.

Periodic mass extinctions appear to have happened at least several
times throughout the Earth's history. In some cases most of the life
forms which existed just prior to these extinctions were completely
wiped out.

The K/T boundary, as it is called, marks the end of the reign of the
dinosaurs and is on the order of 65 Million years old. It is
popularly believed that a large asteroid struck the Earth causing a
worldwide change in climate which interrupted the food chain.

No veggies means no veggie eating dinosaurs and then no dinosaur
eating dinosaurs. The extinction of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to
evolve and if they had not died out we probably wouldn't be here to
talk about it.

More recently discovered 'Smoking Gun' evidence points to another
mass extinction which occurred around 251 Million years ago when
another large asteroid presumably struck the earth.

And there
appears to be even newer evidence that mass extinctions may happen
at the rate of every 62 Million years (+/- 3MY).

Period (End of)

Die out rate

/ X

65 MYA (Cretaceous)

85 %

/1 = 65 MY

208 MYA (Trassic)

25% over time

/3 = 69.33 MY

245 MYA (Permian)

96%

/4 = 61.25 MY

365 MYA (Devonian)

70% over time

/6 = 60.83 MY

438 MYA (Ordovician)

50% + some over time

/7 = 62.57 MY

Average 63.796 MY

By virtue of the chart above I believe
the average is more like 63.796 MY, but for now let's say that 62 MY
(based on current physical evidence) is the periodic mass extinction
average.

251 / 62 = 4.048 (Remember that
number)

Since it is difficult to find a
terrestrial based cause for these extinctions which would repeat on
such regular intervals on such a long time scale, lets say that
something happens every 62 Million (or so) years which puts us in
harms way, so to speak.

Well, guess what ?

In it's orbit
around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, our Solar
system may also do this little sinusoidal motion from the top to the
bottom to the top (and so on) of the Orion arm (image right) which we go around
in.

Now, what if the period of one cycle through the arm is around
124 Million years?

Within one cycle we would pass through the
middle of the ring (the most dense part) twice and about every 62
million years. Are you with me so far ?.

As we spin around in the arm our forward motion (~150,000 miles/sec)
is continuous, but if we go up and down also, that rate would change
with position due to angular motion.

There is also the possibility
that we move side to side within the arm, but for the sake of this
discussion let's ignore that for now.

Now, it's bad enough that we would traverse this much more dense
part of the ring, but we would go through its' center at maximum
velocity, much faster (in the up/down axis) than when we reach the
outer edges of the arm where that relative motion (again up/down)
stops altogether so that it can reverse.

If we didn't stop (in the
up/down axis), we would just fly off into deep space and it would be
bye-bye Milky Way. But luckily (or not) all of the mass nearer the
center of the arm has gravitational force with acts to pull us back
in for yet another cycle.

It may well be that these huge killer asteroids do not 'hit us' as
much as we run into them. Also, traveling at that much greater rate
of speed means that we have a much better chance of hitting randomly
moving objects because we are 'sweeping' through a larger sectional
area of space per unit of time.

The center of the ring isn't a hard boundary, it is just more dense
than on either side and there is a density gradient as you move away
from the center. So, there is some latitude for interval timing due
to this 'kill zone' principal.

Also, since not everything in the
ring rotates at the same speed, conditions through the next pass may
not be the same as the last one, so hitting something (or not)
becomes a bit of a crap shoot. Maybe the Earth gets lucky
occasionally and we shoot through the middle of the ring unscathed.
This would explain gaps in the mass extinction record.

Ok then, remember the 4.048 number I told you to remember when we
started ?

Well, 4.048 is very close to 4... as in 4 complete cycles or 8
centerline passes in 251M years. The error of margin then is about
375,000 years per centerline pass or 187,500 years on either side of
it.

By the way, if my 'napkin' calculations are right, and the dinosaurs
were wiped out by a big asteroid 65 MY ago we are due for the next
one just about... yesterday... minus ~3 MY. In other words, either
we are ~3 Million years over due or just got lucky on this pass.

Lets look at a few numbers. The Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000
Light Years in diameter. Our Solar system is about 26,000 light
years or about 2/3 of the way out from the galactic center and we
revolve at 250 kilometers per second, or about 150 miles per second.

We make
one revolution every 226 MY which means that we have made about 20
revolutions since the Earth was formed about 4.5 BY ago. It is
estimated that there are between 200 and 400 BILLION other stars in
the Milky Way and that at least some of those have planets. It is
likely from looking at our own Solar system that at least some of
those planets probably have moons.

That's a lot of stuff - not to
mention asteroids and comets.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so below is a
graphic below which illustrates my theory.

It is believed that we are about 20
Light Years away from the centerline of the Orion arm which is
believed to be 3000 LY thick in our vicinity.

That works out to
being about .006 or .6% (20/3000) away from the centerline if the
cycle was linear, but it isn't. And we may not be out of the
woods... or rocks, as it were, yet.

If the last mass extinction was 65 Million Years ago and the half
cycle period is around 62 MY then the .006 figure is fairly
predictable (not to mention scary) especially if we are moving away
from the centerline.

One final note though before I go. If you think there is anything we
could do to stop one of these killer asteroids if one were
discovered tomorrow, you have been watching too many Hollywood
movies. NO ONE has a plan on how to deal with this (there are plenty
of ideas) especially our government which, more realistically, would
probably spend our last days in typical fashion trying to decide who
should pay for such a project...

Until asteroids or comets are near a luminous source (like our
Sun)
they are very dark. Most big telescopes are funded to do specific
tasks, they don't hunt for these civilization killers.

And, since
the number of serious amateur astronomers world wide who look for
these objects is probably less than that of the staff at your local MacDonalds, it is likely that the only notice you will receive (if
you are awake and looking in that direction) will be the thousand
foot high wall of debris (which was formerly your neighborhood)
coming at you at about mach three when one of them strikes the
Earth. 2

Cosmic
Year Calculations

Since the sine wave curve in Alexander's orbit is an ellipse viewed
edge-on (this is aside from the to view of the sun's galactic orbit
which is another ellipse), then in order to calculate the path
length in one period of the sine wave, we need to calculate the
length of the perimeter of an ellipse.

It seems in geometry that the ellipse is the "forgotten stepbrother"
of the circle even though the ellipse is far more interesting. First
some definitions.

An ellipse
is the locus of points the sum of whose distances from two fixed
points, called foci, is a constant.Line AB is the
Major Axis (also called Long
Axis or Line of Apsides).Lines AO and OB are the
Semi-Major axes.Line CD is the
Minor Axis and is the
perpendicular bisector of the Major Axis.
Points f1 and f2 are the
foci of the ellipse.
Points A and B are called
apses.
The eccentricity of an
ellipse equals (f1 f2 / AB)

or (c/a)

or (Line f1 B) - (Line A f1)

(Line f1 B) + (Line A f1)

As the eccentricity value goes from
0 to 1, the ellipse goes from circular to highly elongated.

The Minor Axis to Major Axis Ratio,
which we will call Y/X, equals

The
perimeter of an ellipse approximately equals

The area
of an ellipse equals

I have found a new estimate for the
galactic radius of the sun's orbit at 26,000 light years from
galactic center.

This makes the circumference of the orbit over
162,000 LY. Now, if this was a simple planar orbit such as our
planet's orbit in the plane of the ecliptic, the time it takes for
one orbit would be over 229 million years and I have found various
authoritative sources stating figures from 220 to 250+ million
years.

In it's orbit around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, our
Solar
system may also do this little sinusoidal motion from the top to the
bottom to the top (and so on) of the Orion arm which we go around
in.

Now, it's bad enough that we would traverse this much more dense
part of the ring, but we would go through its' center at maximum
velocity, much faster (in the up/down axis) than when we reach the
outer edges of the arm where that relative motion (again up/down)
stops altogether so that it can reverse. If we didn't stop (in the
up/down axis), we would just fly off into deep space and it would be
bye-bye Milky Way.

But luckily (or not) all of the mass nearer the
center of the arm has gravitational force with acts to pull us back
in for yet another cycle.

It may well be that these huge killer asteroids do not 'hit us' as
much as we run into them. Also, traveling at that much greater rate
of speed means that we have a much better chance of hitting randomly
moving objects because we are 'sweeping' through a larger sectional
area of space per unit of time.

There are other possibilities for catastrophic and cataclysmic
events due to solar motion when the solar path intersects what I
would call dust and debris fields in space.

Milky Way
Galaxy Bands of Dust and Gas?

Sun in Orion Arm
We need top consider variations in solar output resulting in climate
change, the rising probability of encounters with comets, asteroids,
and dust, and the possibility of plagues resulting from bacteria and
viruses embedded in dust, comets, and asteroids that could bring us
diseases from space as hypothesized by the late Fred Hoyle in his
book, with Chandra Wrickramasinghe,
Diseases From Space.

Another
periodic event is the reversal of polarity in the terrestrial
magnetic field. We also have speculative periodic events such as
the
Mayan calendar forecast for the winter solstice of 2012 which we
will expand on as we revise this essay from time to time.

Now a complete sinuosoidal cycle would cross the galactic equator
every 62 or 62.5 million years with a half period of 31 million
years. This is data I obtained from a guy named Bob Alexander who
has been looking into this, but he used slightly different figures
that I used to calculate and admits that the minor axis of this
elliptical wave may be less than the 3,000 LY years he initially
calculated with a major axis.

I used a calculator to determine the length of the perimeter of an
ellipse which involves a close approximation using the semi-major
axis and semi-minor axis to determine the actual path length of the
orbit using Bob's figures and thus the time it takes for 1 circuit
around the galaxy.

Within a margin of error I determined that the entire length of the
sinusoidal path would be 180,941.0769 LY (slightly less if the
semi-minor axis is shorter).

This would result in a Cosmic Year
period of 249, 698,580 years instead of 226 million years and if
shortened slightly from errors in estimates to 248 million years we
would have the following calculation:

Here is an interesting translation of
the Mayan Long Count from their cycles of 360 days converted to our
cycles of 365.25 days in terms of years.

Of significance here is the
alautun which is approximately 63,081,429 solar years in length.

If
this represents the periodic extinction cycle which occurs 4 times
in the Cosmic Year, then the Cosmic Year or Period of our Galactic
Orbit may be 4 alautuns or 252, 325, 716 years which is 1.0105 x our
calculated period above.

Cycle

Composed of

Total
Days

Years
(approx.)

kin

1

uinal

20 kin

20

tun

18 uinal

360

0.986

katun

20 tun

7200

19.7

baktun

20 katun

144,000

394.3

pictun

20 baktun

2,880,000

7,885

calabtun

20 piktun

57,600,000

157,704

kinchiltun

20 calabtun

1,152,000,000

3,154,071

alautun

20 kinchiltun

23,040,000,000

63,081,429

In other words, there are 4 critical
points in the Cosmic Year that may result in mass extinction events.

I am still investigating sub-cycles using the Platonic Year, but an
interesting thing is that the solar ecliptic is tilted about 62
degrees from the galactic equator (87 degrees from the celestial
equator) which means the orbital plane of our solar system is at an
angle to the galactic plane that could determine the slope of our
ellipse with a little more calculation which remains to be done.

I admit this is speculation for now, but it may be that we can
improve our forecasts for the future by studying these cycles.

Bob said,

"It is believed that we are about 20 Light Years away from
the centerline of the Orion arm which is believed to be 3000 LY
thick in our vicinity. That works out to being about .006 or .6%
(20/3000) away from the centerline if the cycle was linear, but it
isn't. And we may not be out of the woods... or rocks, as it were,
yet."

Comparing the Mayan Time Cycles to Precession

At this point I will include my essay
entitled SUN STORM in order to examine a growing story about the Mayan time cycles.

Astronomers are learning more about our mysterious star we call the
Sun. The sun is a huge fusion reactor that slowly fuses hydrogen
nuclei into helium nuclei.

Our sun is a medium-sized yellow star that is 93,026,724 miles from
the Earth. This distance also determines a measure of 1 Astronomical
Unit. This distance varies over a year.

The Sun's core can reach 10 to 22.5 million °F. The surface
temperature is approximately 9,900°F (5,500°C). The outer atmosphere
of the Sun (which we can see during a solar eclipse) gets extremely
hot again, up to 1.5 to 2 million degrees. At the center of big
sunspots the temperature can be as low as 7300 °F (4300 K, 4000 °C).
The temperature of the Sun is determined by measuring how much
energy (both heat and light) it emits.

The sun has been determined to be about 4.5 billion years old. The
earth and the sun are of the same age having formed at the same time
according to existing theory.

The sun emits electromagnetic radiation and charged particles.
Frequently, the sun will flare and brighten and an explosive flare
will emit the energy equivalent of millions of 100-megaton Hydrogen
bombs.

Stars like the sun are considered to be stable over their life
cycles. The outward pressure of gases in the solar wind balances the
inward force of gravity. Lucky for us.

Novas

From time to time a white dwarf star will accumulate too much
hydrogen gas from a neighbor and this results in a tremendous
explosion of this gas shell that brightens the star in the heavens.

This is what we know as a nova. It usually occurs at the final
stages of a star's life cycle.

Yet, do we know all that we need to know about novas?

What happens
if a cloud of hydrogen gas of unusually high density were to engulf
our Sun.?

Could a mini-nova result in the expulsion of a shell of
gas that would burst like a firestorm through the solar system?

Although it seems unlikely, studies of ancient history seem to
indicate variations in solar output that may have produced
catastrophic changes on earth.

Even today, a variation in solar
luminosity is occurring and scientists report that the slight
increase in solar output may be contributing to climate change and
global warming.

There is some evidence that some of the other
planets in our system are also experiencing warmer temperatures and
climate change. These changes could be the result of increasing
accumulations of cosmic dust through which our solar system is
passing.

My interest in the sun has recently been stimulated by reports I
have received from a man,
Dr.Dan B.C. Burisch, who claims he is a
microbiologist who works for a shadowy arm of the government. He
tells me that preparations are being made for a coming catastrophe
in the year 2012 that involves changes in our sun and its effects on
the earth.

This is, of course, related to deciphering the Mayan
symbols that seem to point to the winter solstice of our year 2012.

This is such an immense subject that my research on it continues in
spurts. To summarize the predictions it can be said that a recurring
event may cause the change in our sun. That event, known as the
grand crossing, is synchronized to the precession of the
equinoxes.

Here is a description of that event:

"Is there something significant we
should know about the Winter Solstice date of December 21, 2012?
Yes.

On this day a rare astronomical and Mayan mythical event
occurs. In astronomic terms, the Sun conjuncts the intersection
of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic.

The Milky Way,
as most of us know, extends in a general north-south direction
in the night sky. The plane of the ecliptic is the track the
Sun (click image right), Moon, planets and stars appear to travel in the sky, from
east to west. It intersects the Milky Way at a 60 degree angle
near the constellation Sagittarius.

The cosmic cross formed by the intersecting Milky Way and plane
of the ecliptic was called the Sacred Tree by the Maya. The
trunk of the tree, the Axis Mundi, is the Milky Way, and the
main branch intersecting the tree is the plane of the ecliptic.

Mythically, at sunrise on December 21, 2012, the Sun - our
Father - rises to conjoin the center of the Sacred Tree, the
World Tree, the Tree of Life.

The galactic center and the
Great
Rift contain great clouds of hydrogen gas and dust, the
substances out of which stars are formed. These clouds partially
block our view of the bright stars that crowd the galactic
center.

The great rift of the Milky Way begins near Deneb and extends SW
deep into the southern Milky Way ending near Alpha Centauri. The
dust clouds of the rift are probably 1,000 light-years distant
in Cygnus, and approach us in Aquila, Scutum, Sagittarius and
Scorpius, where they are only a few hundred light years away.

The Eagle Aquila is dusted with dark nebulae, ancient star
cities, stellar outbursts and the faint puffs of exploded stars.
Aquila is on the celestial equator and cuts through the great
rift of the Milky Way where it runs NE - SW. Aquila is poor in
clusters, rich in faint planetary nebulae, and loaded with dark
nebulae.

This rare astronomical event, foretold in the Mayan creation
story of the Hero Twins, and calculated empirically by them,
will happen for many of us in our lifetime.

The Sun has not conjoined the Milky
Way and the plane of the ecliptic since some 25,800 years ago,
long before the Mayans arrived on the scene and long before
their predecessors the Olmecs arrived. What does this mean? "

Many do not think that anything special
will happen, but others believe that the Mayans recorded significant
events and used precise calendars to forecast the recurrence of
periodic cycles marked by special events.

Why would the intersection of our sun and solar system with the
Milky Way's equatorial plane constitute a noteworthy event?

"The auspicious year of 2012
indicated in the long count calendar illuminates the fact that
the Precessional movement of the Winter Solstice Sun will
gradually bring its position into alignment with the very center
of our Galaxy.

For the Maya, this is like the last
stroke of Midnight on New Year's Eve; only in 2012 the New Year
is the New Galactic Year of 26,000 solar years. The Galactic
Clock will be at zero point and a New Precessional Cycle will
begin."(from
2012 - The Astronomy Connection)

Maurice Cotterellhas studied the Mayan(below image),
Egyptian, and Incan lost sciences of the sun and has determined that
the sun goes through cycles of magnetic reversals and changes of
direction.

He believes that the ancient calendars show how the earth
was destroyed 5 times due to the sun's twisting magnetic fields.

The last piece of the puzzle that may explain why the sun will react
to this event comes from Dr. Paul LaViolette in his book,
Earth
Under Fire.

"In a nutshell, the book is about
LaViolette's dissertation subject, being [about] the effect of periodic galactic core explosions
- the period being roughly 26,000 years - which send out shells of cosmic rays (chiefly in
the form of electrons moving at near light-speed) that are
hundreds to thousands of light-years thick (the thickness being
the duration of that particular galactic core explosion).

The effect of this constant blast of cosmic rays - once the
shell hits our solar system which is 23,000 light-years from the
galactic core - is to push interstellar dust into the inner
solar system (the dust is normally kept out by the pressure of
the solar wind).

The result of this dust is very major, in a
number of different ways, including,

1) increased flaring of the
sun in the style of T-Tauri stars

2) a downshift toward the
infra-red in terms of the solar radiation reaching the Earth

3) a significant deviation from normal in terms of the total
solar energy reaching the ground

Proto-stars which are starting to blow
away the gas and dust surrounding them are called T-Tauri stars.

The
warm dust remaining around T-Tauri stars still radiates in the
infrared. There is evidence that the remaining dust and gas
surrounding T-Tauri stars form rotating disks which may mark the
beginnings of planetary systems.

When we say that the sun may begin to behave like a T-Tauri star,
this does not mean that the sun transforms into such a star. The gas
and dust accumulation that could occur around the sun may cause it
to behave like a T-Tauri star which could lead to a significant
increase in infrared radiation.

This paper does not explore this theme in depth, but is meant to
point the way to further research.

While it is uncertain that minor
changes in the sun will eventually lead to major consequences, and
while it uncertain that interpretation of Mayan prophecy or
prediction is correct, the fact is that evidence exists that earth
has gone through periodic catastrophes and extinction events in its
history and that major changes in climatic conditions have occurred
and will reoccur in the future.

Research may reveal to us how the
sun has played a role in both catastrophic and extinction events of
the past and how, by further solar studies, we may predict the sun's
wild weather.

Predictions

Since the last major mass extinction event took place during the era
of the dinosaurs in the later Jurassic approximately 65 million
years ago, the prediction is that we may be encountering a major
cycle soon.

Linda Howe on Earthfiles.com provided this graph to show
the paleohistorical extinction cycles on earth.

Researchers studying rocks from
Antarctica have found chemical evidence that a huge meteorite
smashed the Earth 251 million years ago and caused the greatest
extinction event in the planet's history, killing about 90% of all
life.

The extinction, which scientists call the Permian-Triassic
event, some 185 million years before a similar meteorite collision
with planet earth killed of the dinosaurs. Asish R. Basu, a
professor of Earth sciences at the University of Rochester (NY),
said proof of a massive impact 251 million years ago in the
chemistry found in rock fragments recovered on Graphite Peak in
Antarctica.

The latitude in dating these events is such that it indicates that
there is a threat zone that the earth passes through that may have a
duration of a few million years before and after the crossing of the
galactic plane by the solar system.

However a minor cycle such as
the precession of the equinoxes and the minor crossing where the
celestial equator, the galactic center and the galactic plane cross
may have a shorter threat zone in terms of years. If these two
cycles conjoin at some point in the near future, it could signal a
major cataclysm that would not only destroy a large percentage of
life on earth, but probably extinguish unprotected civilization as
we know it.

One thing is for certain. Our orbiting satellites would
not have much chance of survival.